The proposed work is concerned with exploring how some new ideas from condensed matter physics, the theory of spin glasses, may be used to illuminate our understanding of protein folding. Spin glasses are substances which have many disordered states. Folding is the last step in the process of uncoding genetic information into functional molecules. The understanding of folding could allow more rapid advances in genetic engineering. Defects of folding may be involved in some human diseases. The new ideas have to do with trying to use spin glass theory to understand the role of intermediates and misfolded structures in the folding process and how to avoid them in computer algorithms for predicting protein structure from sequence. Several analytical studies of the thermodynamics and dynamics of spin glass models of protein folding are proposed. Computer simulations are also planned that will use the analytical information to optimize folding algorithms.